A Little Background

After owning an iPhone 1.0, an iPhone 3G and an iPhone 3GS, I’ve been impressed with the smartiness of the Apple smartphone brand.  The “i” in “iPhone” signifies the revolutionary nature of the device.  In all three cases however, The “phone” part of “iPhone” seemed to be a cruel misnomer.

You can blame AT&T, and indeed I didn’t have the best signal coverage with my old RAZR on Cingular.  With the iPhone’s problems however, it seems inconceivable that Apple isn’t at least partly to blame.  Perhaps the “smart” part of the smartphone is too smart, making any problem with the phone seem amplified.  More likely, the the secret team in Cupertino didn’t really know exactly what they were doing with the cellular hardware and firmware.

Either way, I learned early-on to avoid making or taking any important calls on my iPhone.  The first iPhone’s antenna seemed to sense when you were having the most vital conversations, and gleefully dropped them.  It also seemed able to tell when you were talking to an older Luddite, someone who took a dropped call to mean a lack of respect.  It got so bad with the first iPhone that I stopped calling it a “mobile phone”; it was a portable phone that you had to used while standing very, very still.

It’s not even the dropped calls that annoy most.  Far worse are the echoed voices and one-way mutes that sometime happen with clear signals.  My iPhones have had no rhyme or reason with service, but all seemed to have contempt for uninterrupted communication.

With the release of the iPad 3G, I’ve decided to try something I’ve always wanted to: put my iPhone head-to-head with a Verizon feature phone in terms of signal strength and call quality. Thanks to the popularity of pay-as-you-go plans, I didn’t have to sign up for anything long terms. It cost about $50 to purchase the phone, including a $25 set-up charge + taxes.

WHAT I FOUND

Not being a review site, we will spare you the numbers.  Its no surprise: the Samsung with its Verizon signal was significantly better at making and taking calls.  I tried all the trouble spots: the office basement, driving across the Brooklyn Bridge, elevators, and other miscellaneous dead zones that have plagued my mobile communications since July 2007.

The result: I got some sort of Verizon signal in every one.  There were spotty connections in a few places of course.  However, instead of getting the dreaded green “call failed” sign, the Verizon call stayed connected, but just degraded in quality.

My unscientific conclusion is that the iphone seems to require a higher signal-strength to maintain any connection- the slightest drop and the call goes dead.  It’s a very digital, binary sort of connection- either all-on or totally dead.

The Verizon call quality reminds me of my experiences with a Motorola RAZR on Cingular.  The call usually stays connected, but the signal waxes and wanes with more or less bars.  Fewer bars mean audible static or short drops of audio.  In all, its more like an analogue connection, with a curving decrease in signal strength as opposed to linear.

As I expected, the Verizon signal was much more reliable.  I can’t help wondering if the diva-like unreliability of the iPhone’s signal doesn’t have at lease something to do with the device itself.

Of course, i’ll keep the iPhone, since it does everything else so much better than any other handheld device I’ve ever used.